Greek myths weren't high on the syllabus of my village primary school, but I do remember a basic telling of this story, and it's stuck with me, because myths are like that. We usually start with the hero Theseus, who agrees to face the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull. For generations King Minos of Crete has been demanding sacrifice of the youth of Athens — seven boys and seven girls, every nine years, sent to certain death in the monster's lair. The thing is, even if the monster doesn't get you, the labyrinth it inhabits is so fiendishly convoluted, it's impossible to escape.
So, Theseus, son of Aegeus, legendary King of Athens, accepts the challenge in order to rid Athens of this menace. In the process, he wins the affections of Minos's daughter, the princess Ariadne. It's she who comes up with the plan of spooling out a ball of thread and, since Theseus is confident he can kill the beast, all he has to do then is follow the thread back out, to escape the labyrinth.
On his triumphant return from Crete, Theseus is supposed to display a white sail on his ship, so his father will know of the victory ahead of time. But Theseus forgets, and his father, Aegeus, thinking his son has perished, is so stricken with grief he jumps from a cliff into the sea, which, thereafter, becomes known as the Aegean. It's a bitter-sweet story then — positive in one sense but also cautionary, and in a way that's more haunting than explicit. And it suggests already this is a story about two opposed relationships to memory, one that forgets and one that doesn't — and everything that follows from each.
But then there's more to the story we were told as children. The first missing element is the genesis of the monster, which begins with a case of breathtaking hubris. King Minos wants to win favour with the god Poseidon, so he's sent a beautiful bull and told to sacrifice it in Poseidon's honour. But Minos is so taken with the bull, he decides to keep it, and breed from it instead, so he substitutes another in its place. But you can never cheat the gods. Indeed they know what you're going to do before you do it yourself, so Poseidon punishes him by having his wife, Pasiphaë, cursed into desiring the bull. Thus through a perversion of desire, the Minotaur is born.
In order to contain this monstrosity, Minos has his master-architect Daedalus create a labyrinth and places the monster at its centre. But is this because the monster is so fearsome, it cannot be contained any other way? Or does Minos merely wish to cover up the shameful nature of its birth, and his own dishonourable role in it? The labyrinth by now is beginning to look less like architecture, and more like fate — Minos's fate, but also ours collectively, since he now demands the eternal sacrifice of our innocence, our youth and therefore our future.
Then we come to Ariadne, saviour of Theseus. We forget she is the sister of the monster, related in blood, and of the house that created it. Therefore in some ways she is part of the corruption at the heart of her father's kingdom. And then we come to the thread. It's such a simple solution, you'd think, someone else might have thought of it. So, we are not to read the thread literally, but metaphorically. And if we do so, the thread becomes symbolic more generally of memory acting as saviour to the hero. What else must Theseus not forget in his battle with the monster? Can it be that he should avoid the fate of becoming a monster himself?
So, Theseus kills the Minotaur and sails home in triumph. Some versions of the myth have him taking Ariadne with him, and they make a romance out of it. But other versions have him calling at the island of Naxos on the way. Here poor Ariadne falls asleep on the beach, and Theseus sails off without her. He abandons her — or, in the versions that read the gods' hand in it, Ariadne's fate was simply never to act as consort to a mere mortal.
Naxos just happens to be strongly associated with the cult of Dionysus, god of revelry and ecstatic abandonment. Sure enough Dionysus sweeps her away, and she becomes consort to the gods instead. She is granted immortality, while the hero, still buzzing with his victory, sails home to Athens and the perpetual tragedy that is the fate of men. Ariadne's thread was able to save him once, but without her protection of remembering, it's inevitable he's going to forget the sail. He will inherit his father's kingdom, ensnared by a fate that is apparently not of his own choosing, yet inevitable all the same.
The labyrinth, then, is more than architecture; its walls conceal both the monster within, and the consequences of hubris — a confusion of ever-branching paths that represent the proliferating patterns of shame, secrecy, and inherited corruption. To enter such a maze is to confront the inescapable — not only the Minotaur at its heart, but also the structures that generate such monstrosity in the first place.
And here lies Ariadne's most subtle, yet profound power: I see her as the poet's princess, the preserver of memory, and orientation. While Theseus battles the monstrous, and risks succumbing to mortal fallibility, Ariadne ensures the thread endures — the thread as narrative, as conscience, and continuity. She transforms the labyrinth from a trap into a story, a myth, a poem, in which human action, memory, and wisdom can navigate fate without being consumed by it. She does not fight the Minotaur herself; she protects the possibility of return.
And it's her union with Dionysus that marks the ultimate recognition of this power. Unlike the warrior, she does not confront the monster directly, but it's her wisdom and memory that allows the labyrinth to be navigated at all. In then being swept into the divine sphere of Dionysus — god of ecstasy, transformation, and the dissolution of ordinary boundaries — Ariadne embodies one whose insight moves beyond mortal limitation, and whose gift preserves orientation, conscience, and culture. Where Theseus's triumph is fleeting and human, Ariadne's thread endures eternally in the realm of imagination and myth, reminding us that the true work of memory and guidance lies closer to the gods than to men.
Myths can appear strange and incomprehensible at a first telling. But their strangeness is the hook and the line that reels us in. And as we get to know the stories better, the more we realise the depths of insight the original tellers of these stories possessed — insight that makes it easy to imagine these tales did not come from mortal minds at all, but arrived, like Ariadne's own gift, as dreams.